A Palestinian Reuters cameraman has been shot dead in Iraq while filming a prison. Reports are that he was killed by U.S. soldiers.

A Reuters staffer told The Associated Press in Baghdad that Dana, a Palestinian, appeared to have been shot by U.S. soldiers as he was videotaping outside the Abu Ghraib prison after a mortar attack there Sunday, in which six prisoners were killed and about 60 others were wounded.

The staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the videotape in Dana's camera showed two U.S. tanks coming toward him, two shots, apparently from the tanks, rang out and Dana fell to the ground. He was taken away by a U.S. helicopter for treatment.

The estimable journalist David Neiwert of Orcinus explains why recent racism charges against Latino Democrat and California gubernatorial candidate Cruz Bustamante are false .

National Consumer Coalition’s Privacy Group has a website section Heroes and Villians that this week names Attorney General John Ashcroft as the " Privacy Villian of the Week" for his upcoming tour garnering support for the Patriot and Victory Acts. We now have a draft of the Victory Act and can confirm that it contains some abominable provisions that will further eviscerate the privacy interests of all Americans. Here are a few, as described by Heroes and Villians:

The full name of the VICTORY Act is the "Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003," and like the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorists" (USA PATRIOT) Act, it is a grab bag of enhanced police-state powers only tangentially related to its bombastic and acronymic title. It is Title V of the VICTORY Act that has the most direct effects on consumer privacy.

Section 503 grants the Attorney General the power to issue "administrative subpoenas" in investigations related to the extremely broad definition of "terrorism" instituted in the USA PATRIOT Act. (An "administrative subpoena" is like a search warrant automatically issued by the Clerk of Court, except without the bother of having a judge sign off on it.) This investigatory power of the DoJ includes the ability to subpoena consumer data from a business. And if so ordered by the Court, the business would not be able to tell anyone about the subpoena for 90 days. Infinite 90-day extensions of this time limit are also available.

This power would be very analogous to the USA PATRIOT Act search warrants issued by the secret FISA court. The House of Representatives has voted to defund enforcement of such warrants on bookstores and libraries.

Then there is Section 504:

We join Amnesty International in condemning the arrest and detention of Lebanese lawyer and human rights activist Dr al-Mugraby in Lebanon.

Dr Muhammad al-Mugraby, who is putting his name forward as a candidate for the post of Chair of the Beirut Bar Association, has in recent years issued a number of statements in which he criticised sections of the judiciary and the Beirut Bar Association, and called for the reform of these institutions.

These prompted the Bar Association of Beirut to instigate a disciplinary action against Dr al-Mugraby accusing him of issuing leaflets and memoranda with the object of "harming and questioning the integrity of the judiciary and the credibility of the Beirut Bar Council".

On 17 January 2003 a disciplinary board of the Beirut Bar Association issued a unanimous decision striking off the name of Dr Muhammad al-Mugraby in absentia from the register of the Bar Association. The decision is subject to appeal, and becomes final only after the defendant has exhausted all means of appeal, according to Article 553 of the Code of Civil Procedures. Dr al-Mugraby appealed against the decision and is still waiting for the outcome. In the meantime he continued to practice law as a lawyer and to represent his clients before the court with the knowledge of the Beirut Bar Association.

Generals from past torture regimes all over Central America are finding safe haven in the U.S.

Florida, California and a handful of other states are home to hundreds of accused war criminals and torturers from all over Latin America, according to Amnesty International, a human rights group. Other suspected human rights abusers have made their way to the United States from Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, Somalia, Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, sometimes settling in the same communities as their victims. (Torture treatment centers and refugee groups claim there are roughly 500,000 torture survivors nationwide, with an estimated 40,000 in the Washington area.)

Some examples:

Vides Casanova and Garcia received U.S. visas in 1989 after retiring from the military; Garcia was granted political asylum on the grounds that he and his children had been threatened during the war. Vides Casanova was allowed to enter the country despite a 1983 report to the State Department that he was likely "aware of, and for a time acquiesced in, the coverup" of the murders of four American churchwomen.

This is a very graphic article, but it's one that raises an important issue and should be read. Why are we providing safety to these war criminals?

In the new issue of Newsweek, Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman provide new details of Attorney General John Ashcroft's 19 city tour that begins this week to garner public support for the Patriot Act and similar legislation he will ask Congress to pass in the near future. The first paragraph alone makes us shudder.

OVER THE NEXT three weeks, Ashcroft plans to swoop into 18 cities, give speeches, meet local officials and grant select press interviews touting department successes using the law. In a conference call and e-mails last week, sources tell NEWSWEEK, the country’s 94 U.S. attorneys were instructed to help gin up support by convening “community meetings,” writing op-ed articles in local newspapers and ensuring that uniformed cops are seated in bleachers behind the A.G. during his visits.

For more on the tour and the new powers Ashcroft is seeking, go here and here.

Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul , "dissenting slightly" with Kevin Drum at Calpundit, explains why Arnold Schwarzenegger's support of the group U.S. English is a problem.

Put aside, for a moment, the fact that "English only" laws -- the focus of the group's work -- don't serve to encourage immigrants to learn English (ESL classes in most places are packed full), but rather to restrict the government's ability to communicate with and provide services to non-English-speaking residents. Beyond that, U.S. English is hardly a benign organization. Its co-founder, John Tanton, founded or helped fund at least 13 anti-immigration groups, three of which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as "hate groups," including this charming collection of vigilantes. Tanton's no longer associated with U.S. English, but one of their current spokesmen is James Lubinskas, a contributing editor to the neo-Confederate American Renaissance magazine.

Jeanne has lots more.... We agree with her. Arnold should disassociate himself from the group. We're also troubled by Arnold's support for Proposition 187, the 1994 California referendum that resulted in illegal immigrants being denied government benefits.

Right now polls show Arnold and Bustamente are running neck and neck. We agree with Kevin that this issue alone will not cause Arnold to lose since he only needs a small percentage of voters to win. But as a symbolic gesture, his withdrawal from the board of U.S. English would be most welcome.

A California Judge has ordered convicted rapist Andrew Luster to pay . The amount includes compensatory and punitive damages.

Say hello to new blog Public Defender Dude, which as the title implies, is written by a public defender. It's very good. We like that PDdude includes both his thoughts on being a public defender and on the criminal justice system, as well as some details of his cases and workdays.

The rantings of a Public Defender constantly fighting against society's pervasive Police Industrial Complex. Enjoy the unique perspective of one who's life's work is to fight the system through the system....

This blog is not only about the criminal justice system. Us Public Defenders tend to be anti-establishment and have strong views on a variety of subjects, most of these views would be at odds with much of the rest of society, but they would tend to be very logical and well thought out views.

New to us, but not blogtopia (yes, Skippy coined that word,) is Chief Wiggles, who writes from Iraq. The Chief is in the Army National Guard, currently stationed in Iraq. Scott Evensoen, the blog's administrator says,

When the war began, the Chief would send his journal entries to family and friends via email. This got to be quite cumbersome, so while he was back here on hardship leave over his mother’s death, I talked to him about setting up a blog. He agreed if I would administer it for him and thus, Chief Wiggles—Straight from Iraq began.

We especially like the pictures from Iraq. Here's a news article about the blog.

Our blog move to a new hosting company is complete. Some comments from yesterday may not appear as they are still on the old server. Also, from time to time the old version shows up instead of the new because the files are currently on both servers. Once we make sure nothing is missing, we will have the files removed from the first server.

A note about comments: Sometimes they take a long time to post to the servers and we're not sure why. We'll try to figure it out. Also, if you put a url in your comment, you have to use the html code as set out in the comment box. Otherwise it skews the site and we will delete it. Your comment remains, just not the url.

Thanks for your patience.

Okay, we're changing hosting companies again. Supposedly there will not be downtime but it's never gone that smoothly before, so we're a little skeptical. The most frequent upset in the past has been that the newest posts get lost. So if you log on in the next few days and the site shows older posts, it's a temporary glitch and we'll be back.

Our hosting cost is doubling, we use a lot of bandwidth (12 - 15 GB a month) probably because we write ten or more entries a day. If you can chip in, it's much appreciated, the amazon and paypal buttons are on the left.

If we go down entirely over the weekend, just know we'll be back.

Buzzflash says,

If Bush Really Wants to Investigate the Cause of the Largest Blackout in American History, He Should Start with the Vice-President, Tom DeLay and Himself

For example, last night, the President said:

We'll have time to look at it and determine whether or not our grid needs to be modernized. I happen to think it does, and have said so all along."

The truth is,

In June of 2001, Bush opposed and the congressional GOP voted down legislation to provide $350 million worth of loans to modernize the nation's power grid because of known weaknesses in reliability and capacity. Supporters of the amendment pointed to studies by the Energy Department showing that the grid was in desperate need of upgrades as proof that their legislation sponsored by U.S. Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA) should pass. [Roll Call Vote #169, 6/20/01].

Read the whole thing.

Drug checkpoints are illegal. Fake drug checkpoints are not. So says the Colorado Court of Appeals.

Colorado police can set up fake checkpoints in hopes of sniffing out illegal drugs, an appeals court ruled in a case where camouflage-clad officers spied on fans during a bluegrass festival in 2000.

Police at the Telluride festival had posted signs along the road saying, "Narcotics checkpoint, one mile ahead" and "Narcotics canine ahead." Officers wearing camouflage hid on a hill and watched for any people who turned around or appeared to toss drugs out of their windows after seeing the signs. After Stephen Corbin Roth, 60, was pulled over for littering, police found a marijuana pipe and mushrooms while searching his car.

The appeals court said that while drug checkpoints are illegal -- because motorists are stopped at random and without reasonable suspicion of committing a crime -- the discovery of the pipe gave the officers probable cause to stop Roth's vehicle.

Indiana is doing it too. From Fourth Amendment.Com (scroll down to August 12):